The Last Best Place (15 page)

In winter this can be a hard, unforgiving province. But in August, when the plants are full and the sky is clear and uninfluenced by haze, I find it a liberating place. Things seem to give off the loopy weirdness that surfaces when people are able to live life as they take it. It happens even in the most ordinary place. Wolfville is one of the prettiest of Annapolis Valley towns. It is gorgeous, in a way that touches something strange beneath your breastbone. A sense
of the bittersweet lingers. Even if you’ve never been here before, Main St. is as familiar as a Frank Capra set piece: one of those great old movie theatres, nice-looking restaurants and coffeehouses, comfortable elm-shaded houses, all with the dramatic Minas Basin and lush farmland as backdrop. Once you see Acadia University, the town’s tiny perfect Baptist college, you understand why anyone who ever went to school here looks back on their years with a golden hue. I have no idea what it is like inside the classroom, but it seems entirely reasonable that a person could spend a lifetime trying to rediscover the immense joy they experienced here, and probably never find it.

But whenever I visit I’m on the lookout for the straight-backed military bearing, the austere crewcut and the angular, arrogant face of a monk from some superior order. Alex Colville, the man European critics have called the most important realist painter of the twentieth century, lives down Main St. past the university gym in a comfortable house where his wife, Rhoda, grew up. The couple moved here for good after Colville resigned his university teaching post in New Brunswick to paint full-time. “People thought what I was doing was just crazy,” he said the one time we met. “Everyone was doing Jackson Pollock and all that crazy abstract stuff. Most of them thought I was just too dumb to know what was going on. But I’ve never had that much interest in what other people were doing.”

I love his work—dark, enigmatic, with the quiet ring of destiny far in the background. As much as that I love the fact that he chooses
to do it here. In the very midst of all this beauty and
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
nostalgia so far away from the centre of the art world is Colville, going his own way, ignoring convention, painting trucks, boats and trains, women who bear an uncanny resemblance to his wife and haunted-looking men who seem undeniably like himself.

Bear River, which sits pleasantly nearby in a small valley, its old, roomy wooden homes half-obscured in the heavily treed hills leading down to the cleft that forms the centre of town, is a different kind of place. Some promotional wiz has nicknamed it Nova Scotia’s Switzerland. It is quite a sight, particularly when the river that bisects the village is at low tide, leaving the rear ends of the waterfront houses and buildings suspended on timber stilts twenty feet from the muddy bottom.

Visit the local tourism office. Inside, a cheery university student tells how the town was founded by British Loyalists and the German mercenaries hired by the British crown during the American Revolution. Buy a couple of postcards, maybe the one that shows the 1902 Cherry Carnival, which, she says, is still running, even though the cherry trees around here are all gone and they have to import fruit to keep the tradition alive; the other is a tall-masted ship passing down the river during the village’s heyday in the Golden Age of Sail.

Bear River clearly isn’t doing too bad. Even someone as untutored as me can tell the stuff for sale in the shops and galleries on the main street is made by real artists. The village is getting a name with the tourists. Meantime, every hippy in the world who can still
walk has somehow heard about this place—the dog groomers from Vancouver, the woodworkers from New York City, the stained-glass artists from Argentina. Bear River is one Love, Peace, Marijuana, Kill the Pigs kind of place. I like the fact that oddballs flourish here. Bear River, despite its combination of come-from-aways and old-time Nova Scotians, works. I realized this on my first visit after watching a tourist nearly run down by a middle-aged man with thick glasses. He drove an old one-speed bicycle but made the gear-shifting noises of a five-speed mount somewhere deep down in his throat. “Oh, that’s Walter Wamboldt,” chuckled Rob Buckland-Hicks when I described what I saw. “He’s the sweetest guy. He knows the birthday of every woman in town, and leaves them wildflowers on their doorstep.” Buckland-Hicks sports a walrus moustache and leather sombrero to go with his Brit accent. He has another nice story: years ago while living and painting in England he came to visit Nova Scotia and ended up spending a few pleasantly aimless days on nearby Brier Island. One day he was lying on a beach on the secluded back side of the island when he looked up and saw a beautiful dark-haired woman wearing a hat adorned with eagle feathers emerge from the fog and walk towards him. He sat there transfixed as she strolled past as if in a waking dream. He spent the next few days hunting her down, ended up marrying her and settled in Bear River, where he runs a choice gallery that handles mainly the works of local artists.

Things like that actually have a chance of happening in Bear River. The last time we were here I took Belle, Sam, and a couple
of cousins into a shop called Return of the Toymaker. Inside the toymaker himself leaned over a flywheel drill press, working on a piece of wood. He learned how to make handcrafted wood toys from a traditional German toymaker. When I ask what brought him here he said, “When you follow your heart you know things are right even if you don’t know why.”

Sometimes I am not sure if I am in modern-day Canada or not. Around the edges of the province it can be hard to tell. In the northeast I once stood in a recreation centre watching twelve hundred Germans who lived in the area belting out Bavarian drinking songs till the little hours of the morning. Another time, outside of the town of Inverness in Cape Breton, I stopped in a clearing on the ocean side of the road when I noticed a cairn. The plaque read: BUAIDH NO BAS (Erected in memory of our MacDougall forebears who settled these shores in 1808 and also their descendants who worked this soil and also those whose blood traces from here).

I am no stranger to this part of the province, where my aunt and uncle summer in a cedar home surrounded by wooded hills, not far from a beach complete with a 100-foot waterfall. But I had never before been to the circular stone and glass house where Sylvia Fischer lives. When I arrive she introduces me to her sister and niece who are visiting, then makes tea and brings out some cookies. She is in her sixties, has short grey hair, a friendly open face and wears an untucked plaid shirt that dangles over black pants. She talks about how her friend Jean, who lived down the way, first
came to Cape Breton on a bicycle trip in 1940 and promptly fell in love with the place. And how a year or so later Fischer received an invitation to come down from Chicago and visit. “We came the week the Canso Causeway was built,” she recalls, referring to the historic day the island was physically connected to the mainland. “We were the only car on the road, and the first thing we ran into was a flock of sheep. Flowers grew right down to the edge of the road, borders of daisies and buttercups. For the first few years here we lived with Jean in her stable. Finally we said, ‘We love it so much we want to stay.’ ”

Near the door I notice a collection of curled-at-the-corners black-and-white snapshots—fishing boats, rugged faces and some views of the local terrain, all held on the wall with thumbtacks. Fischer says, “All those people used to live up here. Duncan Rankin went to work as a stevedore in Dartmouth; Joe Rankin used to tend his sheep. That’s the Port Ban beach down by your uncle Earl’s. There used to be two or three fishermen who fished out of there. There used to be fifty people living on top of the cape.”

I knew the story afterwards. The mine opened up in Inverness, the people left, the properties sat vacant. Eventually the county sold them off for back taxes. Most went to Americans, but a lot were taken by people from Ontario and elsewhere in Canada. The faces changed. Word got out and the area became a mecca for come-from-away artists and anyone else looking for a beautiful place without distractions where they could do their own thing. I’m told the attendant at the gardening centre at the Co-op is as
good at watercolour seascapes as at building a mulch pile. I know of a fisherman who is as likely to be found sculpting in his studio as tending to his lobster traps. Go to a square dance here and you can run into Philip Glass, the composer, or his buddy Rudy Wurlitzer, the screenwriter, or Helen Tworkov, the editor of
Tricycle
, a worldwide Buddhist newspaper published in New York. Take a stroll on the beach and you might end up lending your snorkelling gear to Spalding Gray, the monologist. Or you might say hi to someone, then realize it was Willem Dafoe, straight off a Hollywood set.

Somewhere you might even run into Robert Frank, the reclusive Swiss photographer, filmmaker and spiritual godfather to the New Yorkers who have discovered Inverness County. Now seventy, Frank has lived in Mabou Coal Mines with his artist wife, June Leaf, for the past quarter century. They came in 1970, twelve years after the images he brought together in
The Americans
changed North American photography forever. Moving to Mabou didn’t slow him down one bit: he made a film,
Candy Mountain
, about a fellow (played by Tom Waits) travelling around rural Cape Breton in search of a legendary guitar maker (based on Otis Thomas, the backwoods Stradivarius who lives near Baddeck). And, of course, he took pictures. As a
New Republic
review of a retrospective of his work pointed out: “After the death of his 20-year-old daughter Andrea in 1974, the terrain became the correlative of his internal wound, the rocks and pilings and glaciers appearing as emblems of his grief in the many pictures connected to her memory … The
pictures made in Nova Scotia before her death assemble a difficult beauty from bleak elements; in those afterward the bleakness itself is the beauty which emerges pure from surfaces laden with verbal and textural scars.”

Since I’m Earl and Rea’s nephew, Sylvia agrees to make some introductions on my behalf. She calls a neighbour, Richard Serra, the mercurial, world-renowned American sculptor whose works can be as big as skyscrapers. She puts the phone down laughing. “Big frosty silence when I asked if you could come over. I’ll call Joanna,” she says, referring to JoAnne Akalitis, the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Akalitis says, “Hey, how are ya, sure, c’mon over this afternoon.”

A little later I am inside her bungalow—grey weathered cedar shingles, big windows and an aqua blue metal roof. She has served up iced tea and tasty leftover pasta with eggplant. We eat in a big airy kitchen with funky art posters covering the walls and books scattered everywhere. She’s busy: adapting Strindberg’s
The Dance of Death
in collaboration with Philip Glass, her next door neighbour and ex-husband, and working on a jazz adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s memoir
Running in the Family
.

“I’ve been coming here for twenty-five years,” she explains between bites. “Phil Glass and I had to get out of New York one summer. We meant to stop in Maine, but I don’t know, I guess we just kept on going until we reached here. The fact that it is exactly 1,000 miles away from New York, or maybe it’s 999 miles or maybe it’s 1,030 miles, that means something. It is a place which has
tremendous power. When I think of Cape Breton I think of Paul Bowles who went to Tangier and all those people who visited him like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg. They never managed to make a community there, but Bowles stayed. There was no opera, there was no ballet, there was no library with incredible books. But it was to his tastes.

“I don’t even really like the country—it’s kind of scary for me. But this place is very interesting. Great walks. You can go to a dance. As long as I can swim and go for a walk I’m happy. My best friend here is a priest, Stanley MacDonald, who lives in Sydney. He’s got a cottage over there. This combination of woods and sea is great. New England is beautiful, but Cape Breton has an openness that reminds me of Northern California. I also think Nova Scotia is very spiritual—it is no accident that all those Buddhists in Pleasant Bay ended up here. And the culture … I went to this dance at Southwest Margaree and saw Ashley MacIsaac and said, ‘Wow, this is the real thing.’ ”

A couple of years ago she brought the young fiddler to New York to cast him in her production of Georg Büchner’s
Wozzeck
. The setting was nineteenth-century Germany, but under Akalitis’s direction it was transformed into modern-day Cape Breton and launched MacIsaac’s international career. Nothing unusual in that; her work is shot through with the island’s influence. Twenty-five years ago, she and Glass started the Mabou Mines theatre group, which is still going today in New York and is the oldest collaborative theatre company in America. They rehearsed the first piece
right here on this property. Later she did Samuel Beckett’s play
Cascando
—Glass wrote the music for it—and set it in a Cape Breton farmhouse with a bunch of people sitting around a table. “There were guys with hats and there was this pregnant woman.” She laughs. “I thought it was very beautiful actually.”

I can’t necessarily envision her sitting down to play cards with some of the local ladies and asking if they are up for a round of iced lattes. But accommodation is made all the way around up here. Amusement may skirt the edges of a generational Cape Bretoner’s face when a gaggle of New York hipsters troops into the Ceilidh Café, resplendent in their goatees and body piercings looking for all the world like any second now the door would swing open and Kerouac and Cassady would glide through. But even the come-from-aways know that when they arrive in the spring the shopkeepers will wave in greeting. Their neighbours will come to the door and say, “When did you get home?”

Back in town it is midafternoon. Prom dresses are here! says the sign on the bulletin board at the Inverness Small Animal Clinic. In God We Trust, declares the motto for the Evans Coal Mine. From Main St. the beach looks empty and wild. On each side of the road, mine company buildings lean and slump. With time to kill after my visit with Akalitis I stop at the spiffy new offices of the Inverness
Oran
(weekly circulation 8,000, nearly 2,000 of them off-island). Frank Macdonald, bald-headed, wild-bearded, the paper’s most popular columnist, is so welcoming that two minutes after meeting him I’m down in the basement enjoying a cup of tea. Macdonald is
a wealth of island info and gossip. I’m curious what he thinks about all the newcomers buying up properties, and whether he is concerned that everyone arriving in search of their Last Best Place could ruin the very thing that drew them here.